Chinese citizens who suffered forced detention, torture, and a panoply of brutal human rights abuses at the hands of the Chinese government have been engaged in a high profile court case against Silicon Valley mainstay Cisco Systems for many years. Those Chinese citizens suffered yet another indignity in a California court a couple of weeks ago: a district judge dismissed the case against Cisco without even giving them the chance to gather evidence on the key point where the court found them wanting. The court noted that even though Cisco may have designed and developed the Golden Shield system for the purpose of tracking, identifying and facilitating the capture of Chinese religious minorities, Cisco would not be held liable because it didn’t do enough in the U.S. to facilitate human rights abuses. EFF attempted to file an amicus brief in the case after oral argument, but it was rejected.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has released an excellent report today on the right to privacy in the digital age, blasting the digital mass surveillance that has been taking place, unchecked, by the U.S., the U.K, and other world governments. The report is issued in response to a resolution passed with unanimous approval by the United Nations General Assembly in November 2013. That resolution was introduced by Brazil and Germany and sponsored by 57 member states.

One of the most unnerving things about modern communications technology is the way devices constantly leak information about their physical whereabouts—to mobile carriers, network operators, e-mail providers, web sites, governments, even shopping mall owners. Many of these information leakages are simple historical accidents. The designers of technologies never considered that technical standards would let everyone around you notice your device's presence. They never considered that technical choices would let web sites infer when two people are (or aren't) spending the night in the same residence, or let your phone company follow you around virtually from moment to moment.

There has been plenty of bad news when it comes to NSA spying, so it’s encouraging when the news is good. At the end of May, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology signaled the beginning of the end for NSA’s effort to undermine encryption, passing an amendment that extricates the NSA from the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) work on encryption standards.

In September of last year, ProPublica, the Guardian, and the New York Times broke the story that the NSA had systematically “circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling” that protects the Internet, “collaborating with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products.”